Fraters Libertas

Everybody Cares About The Weather
But Everybody Should Know Better

According to the headline to this story in London's The Independent, Britain has now experienced its "hottest October 27th ever". The Independent's intentionally ominous use of the word "ever" is clearly meant to strike the global warming fear in me down to my very withered and tortured lump of a soul. The mental leap we're all supposed to make is that since the earth itself formed from the rapidly expanding remnants of the Big Bang some 4.5 billion years ago there has never been an October 27 in Britain when temperatures came even close to the level that they did today.

But...hold on for just a minute here. Britain, or the United Kingdom, really didn't exist until England swallowed up Wales in 1536. So today's record temps in the U.K. were the hottest in Britain, by definition, since around 1536. We're still talking about extreme temperatures within a 469 year span, though. That's still pretty scary...no?

Wait...The Independent story specifically addresses the hottest "October 27th" in Britain's history. Well, by my recollection, the Gregorian calendar, which designates one day per solar year as October 27th, wasn't even adopted by Great Britain until 1752. Still...that's 253 years of non-hot weather on the 27th of October. Pretty frightening statistics, don't you agree?

Well...maybe not. Reading a couple paragraphs past the headline in the very same article that is trying to frighten me into driving this, we come to my favorite global warming disclaimer (emphasis mine):

Just four days before Hallowe'en, Britain was enjoying the warmest 27 October since records began in 1880.

And there we have it...125 years of records...and today's temps are supposed to mean that there's an imminent weather related Armageddon on the horizon? Come on, people. We ain't even in the ballpark of "the hottest ever" temperatures on this planet. I have a hard time believing that they were even the hottest temperatures in the past 500 years.

The Brits experienced nothing more than the warmest temperatures in the past 125 years on one particular day on one location on a planet whose climate is constantly changing despite, and in spite of, all the efforts of its inhabitants to stabilize it.

Prince Charles said yesterday that climate change is the "greatest challenge to face man". I fear that the greatest challenge to face man may actually be those who brandish embellished and contrived weather statistics.